1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to encrypting discrete signals, such as to encrypting voice information, and to decrypting accordingly.
2. Description of Prior Art
In the use, transmission, administration and archiving of audio material it is often desirable to protect the respective contents from unauthorized access. In particular in the field of voice recording there is a necessity to prevent unauthorized playback or clandestine interception during the transmission. At the same time, however, the data format used is to remain valid so that the appliances used for playback do not transition to error conditions even in the event of unauthorized access. This applies particularly to compressing data formats such as data formats in accordance with standards MPEG2 Layer 3 and MPEG2/4 AAC (AAC=Advanced Audio Coding).
In audio applications there is the added aspect that the encrypted signals must not do any damage to the interception equipment in the event of intercepting without decryption. The encrypted signals should therefore be encrypted such that they do not create any crackling or rustling or other extreme dynamics discontinuity when played back without being decrypted. Whereas when encrypting music data it is often sufficient to limit the quality of unauthorized playback to a large extent, it is requested in particular, for voice contents, that in the event of unauthorized use, the playback quality of the data encrypted should no longer allow the voice information, which may be, e.g., interviews, reports etc., to be intelligible.
Patent application WO 99/51279 entitled “Vorrichtung und Verfahren zum Erzeugen eines verschlüsselten Audio-und/oder Videostroms” (apparatus and method for creating an encrypted audio and/or video stream) whose applicant is also Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft, describes a method of scrambling encoded audio data based on permuting lines in a frequency range. This method allows making music signals largely unrecognizable. With voice contents, however, the exact spectral composition of the signal is of little importance for its intelligibility, so that the content of the spoken words and/or the voice information remains intelligible even though the voice of a speaker is alienated to a large extent.